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arch: skills needed^skill-tests in IV?

Most items below are relevant for a senior developer too, but this discussion is about software architects. By “Skill” I mean something practical, relevant, value-adding… An architect should bring some of these skills to a team. Think of these as job duties, if you like.

skill – insight on the limitations of a large number of impractical/discredited designs. Everyone can come up with some solutions on-paper, but most of them won’t work.skill – know a large number of common errors and solutions — usually available on google but way too many. You don’t need insight. Just awareness is valuable enough. This comes from “mileage”.skill – insight on weakness and limitations of dominant, default solutions (like Oracle, linux, WCF, protobuf…)skill – insight on project best practices and their limitationsskill – know a large number of FOSS and commercial solutionsskill – write library component for others. The more developers use the component, the more senior this author isskill – multiple technologies (non-trivial skill with each). Most financial/non-financial apps need more than one of DB, java/c#/c++, javascript, GUI, MOM, so an architect needs proficiency with more than one technology.skill – practical testing strategy, automated or not. Junior guys may be too busy to worry about these. Testing can be tricky.skill – tuning, optimization. Often overrated relative to GettingThingsDone.** memory mgmt** data structures nitty-gritty** threading

Those are the skills interviewers like. Here are some evidence interviewers look for —